Saturday, November 21, 2015

The TV shows shown at last night’s “Mars Movie Night” — an
episode of Babylon 5 from its last
season (in fact, there were just two more episodes after this one) and two
shows from the interesting series spinoff, Crusade — proved surprisingly compelling, and after last
week’s events in Paris these shows (especially the latter Crusade episode, “Ruling from the Tomb”) seemed deeper and
richer than they might have otherwise, especially given that they were written
and produced in 1999, two years before the 9/11 attacks brought the “war on
terror” home to the U.S. Babylon 5
was originally based on an idea by Harlan Ellison, a marvelously creative
writer but also notoriously tetchy and protective of his ideas. Ellison gave
interviews before the show went into production saying that he wanted it to be
the ultimate “answer story” to Star Trek, for which he’d written one of the best and most highly regarded
episodes (“The City on the Edge of Forever”), but the producer, J. Michael
Straczynski, took over, rewrote the whole concept and used so little of what
Ellison had provided that he got
listed as “creator” of the series while Ellison got only the nebulous credit
“conceptual consultant.” Later, when he spun off Crusade for Turner Network Television (TNT), it was
Straczynski who had to fight off notes he got from the bosses at TNT, including
their insistence that the first episode begin with a fist fight (why?), so it
was Straczynski who got to enact the role of the put-upon Artist forced to
compromise his vision at the behest of the “suits.” (Karma — ain’t it a bitch.)
I hadn’t watched any of either of
these shows until I started seeing them at the Mars movie nights, but as nearly
as I could tell from what I’ve seen so far of Babylon 5 it seems to center around a spaceship called Bellerophon which gets involved in what amounts to a war between
Earth and its former colony Mars, in which the human outpost on Mars helps
dethrone a corrupt Earth President and declares its independence.

The main dramatis
personae on the episode we watched last
night, “Objects in Motion” (which was followed, almost inevitably, by “Objects
at Rest,” though the cultural referent that occurred to me was “ … may be
closer than they appear”), in addition to the series regulars (led by Bruce
Boxleitner as John Sheridan, the captain of the Bellerophon — or was it the Agamemmnon, as I recorded it the last time I posted about this
show?), were Tessa Holloran (Marjorie Monaghan), first president of the newly
independent Mars (she’s also referred to as “Number One” and I couldn’t help
but wonder if this was an oblique reference to the character of “Number One,”
the cold, emotionless woman who was going to be the second-in-command on the
original Star Trek until the
first pilot, “The Cage,” was rejected and her coolly logical demeanor was
grafted onto the Vulcan Mr. Spock to give Leonard Nimoy the character all
Trekkies know and love); and Lise Hampton-Edgars (Denise Gentile), who’s just
inherited ownership of one of the biggest companies exploiting Mars’s resources
in its colonial period. She’s also engaged to Michael Garibaldi (Jerry Doyle,
second billed to Boxleitner on the series’ regular cast list), who as the
episode begins she’s helping detox from a long spell of heavy-duty drinking (so
he hardly seems like a prize catch), but whose help she needs to get rid of a
corrupt board of directors who tried to have her assassinated because they were
worried that she and Garibaldi would uncover their corrupt machinations and get
them jailed for ripping off both the company and the Martians.

Another part of
the plot concerned the farewell party being given for G’Kar (Andreas Katsulas),
one of the indigenous Martians on the show — you can tell the indigenous
Martians because they’re wearing ugly and pretty blatantly fake-looking helmets
to make their heads look bulging and their skin look mottled — which is where
Garibaldi and Lise figure the hit people hired to kill her will strike. This episode
had the look and feel of something being drafted to tie up loose ends before
the show completed its run (indeed, one imdb.com reviewer, the quite prolific
“planktonrules” from Florida, wished the show had ended with this episode
because “the final two were amazingly depressing and maudlin”), and it seemed
quite beautiful and moving even though one would have to have a lot more knowledge of what happened inthe previous 4 ¾ seasons to
appreciate it fully. But then I’ve long felt that is one of the
annoyances of TV serials: whereas episodes of classic series like Law
and Order and its spinoffs were
self-contained and you could generally enjoy them without having to have
watched them all, too many modern shows tell you basically that in order to
enjoy them you have to watch all the episodes in sequence, and when TV
producers tell me “all or none,” they’re pretty well guaranteeing I will watch
none.